ACCOZZAGLIA

[This is mostly for my own reference, capturing a snapshot of my mental head space in response to my latest marks.]

SOC101Y1
My third sociology exam was written last week, and already (in record time of five days!), the marks are in. I started shakily enough with the first exam in October, followed by a notable improvement on the second one in December.

At last, I walk away with a mark I can feel proud of. In the latest exam, its posted marks just announced about six hours ago, I yielded a solid A, which was well above the class average of a borderline C+/B-. My December mark was a B+, and my October was a C-. I attribute this steady improvement to my adjustment to university life and figuring out how what profs expect in the exams. Moreover, my strength is in writing essays, not writing exams (especially Scantron exams), so there was a necessity to acclimate. I have been promised that after first year, it becomes more about the essays. I’m all for that.

UNI220Y1
I’m waiting to hear back on the feedback and marks for my second essay’s annotated bibliography. Last term, my annotated bibliography was an A, and the resulting essay was an A+, which apparently was one of the very few A+ essays in a class of 100 or so.

My essay in first term discussed health care privatization and whether this is a good idea or whether national health insurance still has a place in Canada today, even as Québec and Alberta move ahead with privatized health care. I chose to strongly argue in favour in the institution of health care being accessible to all through national health insurance, though for those wealthy few who insist on privatized care (which offers choice and preference, as it were), they could opt out permanently from the medicare national plan (OHIP in Ontario, MSP in B.C., etc.), knowing full well that were something to happen to them economically and one day might no longer afford privatized care, they would not be able to revert to national health insurance in the future because of the waiver they signed when leaving medicare. To waive this institution, I argued, is to offer a vote of no-confidence in a system that, while far from perfect, still works and can continue to do so.

I should know about the second essay’s annotated bibliography by next week. That essay is due April 10th. I chose to write about the cultural institution of CanCon — “Canadian Content”. This began in 1970 in response to Canadian musicians not having a place on the radio as American and British atists crowded out local talent. The controversial policy, which mandates a certain quota of content to originate from Canadian musicians (or songwwriters, in the event a song is recorded by a non-Canadian) on a per hour or per diem basis, was extended to film and television around the same time. This is not unlike cultural policy found in Australia, the UK, Sweden, Norway and France, all which find themselves competing heavily with the ubiquitous American entertainment industry — a kind of cultural imperialism, really.

I am arguing that CanCon serves a functional purpose for both anglophone and francophone audiences, since American content is otherwise unrestrained and pervasive without some governance — especially given the majority of our population’s physical proximity to so many American TV and radio feeds. American programming and music isn’t in itself the problem, since good material should stand on its own merit, regardless its origin. But when media consolidation in the U.S. has flattened the variety, presenting a homogenized platform, it does little good for a budding Canadian artist or director to establish footing if they don’t have a place to do so if they’re always competing with foreign media giants. Without CanCon, a lot of good talent would have been ignored and never given the chance to exist — from Sarah McLachlan to Michael J. Fox, and from Barenaked Ladies to Dan Aykroyd.

Personally, the musical discoveries I have made because of CanCon rules have been continuous and joyous, as I am being granted an entire visage of pop music that was barred by proxy from my ears when I lived in the U.S. I admit feeling muted glee when I hear the radio play Spoons, Rough Trade, Parachute Club (“Love Is Fire” is playing on JACK-FM right this second!), K-OS, Len, Barenaked Ladies, Paul Hyde — or watching Kenny v. Spenny, Corner Gas, Criminal Minds (filmed in Vancouver!) or Degrassi. So little of this was privy to me in the U.S., where I felt numbed by what little I could explore.

DTS201H1
This was Diaspora & Transnational Studies. The course is taught in two halves, but I elected to wait on the second instalment as this new department gets their act together. I had two good profs and a horrid one. Writing the essays was like trying to hit a moving target in the dark, because what was supposed to be social science or humanities in nature often ended up being more like “Victimize Me, Please!” Studies. I’d prefer to cut through the propaganda, morass and balderdash and cut to the quick of why things happened, how they were detrimental, and how could one move forward from here. Too often, though, it felt like they wanted to hear “more oppressed than thou” arguments and dwell on that rather than see where we are today, and where things are headed, as well as what lessons were learned. Three essays with very limited feedback (and in some cases, waiting 13 weeks to get both paper and mark back!) comprised the term: I received a C-, B- and A-, respectively, ending me with a somewhat frustrating B-. this was still above the class C+ average, so not all was lost.

ABS230H1
ᓇᒥᕐᒥᐅᑕᐅᕕᑦ. “namirmiutauvit[?]“
ᒥᓂᐊᐳᓕᔅ ᒥᕐᒥᐅᑕᐅᔪᓐᒐ. “Minneapolis mirmiutaujunga.”

This is Inuktitut — ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑐᑦ — the language of the Inuit/Inuk. Now why, you wonder, am I learning a language that perhaps 100,000 people at most can speak? I’m using it as an exercise to assess my ability to comprehend the mechanics of learning a new language that isn’t one I have already been unintentional or deliberate exposure. In effect, that would be most languages offered and spoken anywhere — be it 日本語 (Japanese), Español, Français, Deutsch, Nederlands, Italiano, and so on.

So I went with one which was virgin to my ears. So far, I’m having OK marks come of the experience, definitely doing better in written exams than the oral, conversational ones. This isn’t surprising to me. I get very nervous trying to communicate to a native speaker in their language. It’s up there with trying to remember lines when I’m on stage in a play. On the first written exam, I yielded an A-. On the first oral exam, a B-. Hopefully I can make up for lost ground in the last set of exams.

ANT100Y1
I came to the UofT for anthropology, but if my one and only exam — a term exam covering two profs and 12 lectures, which is much greater in load compared to any other exam I’ve thus far written — serves as a sign for things to come, I might as well be looking at a bachelor in underwater dessication studies.

I scored a D+ on that first exam (25% of the total mark), hurting most on the archaeology section while faring better on the physical anthro portion (mostly primate evolution, from lemurs and other prosimians to Gigantopithecus blacki and Homo sapiens sapiens).

This was especially stinging, considering how in grade 5 I was enrolled in a gifted-talented class devoted exclusively to archaeology. The archaeology prof for ANT100Y1 really pushed for memorization of site location names and less so for the classes of artefacts prior humans created and used, their technologies, and the archaeological processes involved with field research, dating methods and other functional matters. Considering that few archaeologists concentrate on more than a couple sites or regions through an entire career (in his case, B.C. and the Canadian Arctic), I found it serving little value to press so hard on knowing every site and in every region, save for ancient Greece and Roman areas.

The second half so far has concentrated on linguistics, semiotics, and now cultural anthro. I found the linguistic-semiotic section remarkably engrossing. By far it is the most abstract of the four sub-disciplines being discussed, but already a lot of it makes clear sense to me. It probably helped that I spent three years in speech therapy when I was a kid to counter perceived speech impediments I was accused of having then. Some of the material was literally hand-in-hand with what I learnt from my speech therapy teacher, Miss Bagwell.

There will be another term exam, also counting 25% of the total mark, followed by a final exam two weeks later covering all four sections and counting for 50%. No pressure, eh? April is going to be a hellacious month.

If somehow I escape distaster and improve this mark, then at least I have the support of my physical anthro prof (who spends the four months after schol ends conducting his lemur research in the remote jungles of northern Madagascar) when it comes to my developing interest in sasquatch research. He noted that I failed in my effort to discredit myself in the anthropology department by making mention of the North American wood ape, aka. “bigfoot”. Because of him, I’m now endowed with the responsibility to prove definitively that sasquatch do not exist. If I fail at that, well then, that can only mean two things. And one of those is that I’d be a failure.

ᑕᑯᓛᕆᕗᒍᑦ. [takulaarivugut!]